You Can't Predict Future Markets After Flat Years

U.S. markets essentially made no gains in 2015. The major indexes are more or less flat for the year to date. The Nasdaq-100 Index has done best, gaining about 8 percent, driven by a handful of big winners such as Amazon, which is up 116 percent for the year. Yet the flat returns belie a big increase in volatility, including a sell-off of almost 20 percent at the end of the summer that investors had made up by late fall.